Bush White House Will Start Squeaky-Clean

The White House is the hub of government, yet the new staff that walks into the West Wing on Inauguration Day will be lucky to find a scrap of paper to jot down a phone number.

When a president leaves office, the White House is swept clean. File drawers are emptied. Hard drives are yanked from computers. Office furniture is piled in the hallways. Institutional memory disappears.

“The White House they enter is whistle clean. It contains empty desks, no files from their predecessors,” says Martha Kumar, one of several presidential scholars working to smooth the 10-week presidential transition, which is even shorter this year because of the postelection ballot drama.

This clean sweep is mandated by federal law, but presidential experts say starting from scratch might not be the best way to begin a new presidency.

“When I walked in, there was not a piece of paper in the drawers. I think the only thing I found was a paper clip in one drawer,” said Edwin Meese, counselor to President Reagan in the early 1980s and later attorney general.

“There’s some stuff at the National Security Council. And in the White House counsel’s office there are some records, but not an awful lot. You kind of expect that the old administration is going to have cleared out, but you’re a little bit surprised that the place is as bare as it is.”

The Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978, requires the paper purge.

It says the official records of the president and his staff are the property of the United States, not the chief executive. The National Archives takes custody of them and preserves them for eventual public release.

In President Clinton’s case, boxes of papers already are being shipped to a warehouse in Little Rock, Ark., site of his presidential library, which will be administered by the archive staff.

“The most surprising thing to many people is that the computers are not functioning,” said Alvin Felzenberg, executive director of the President’s Commission on the Federal Appointments Process in the Bush administration.

Kumar, a political scientist at Towson State University in Maryland, and others who have studied presidential handoffs, believe some material could be given to newcomers to help them get started. Kumar’s “White House 2001 Project” has interviewed White House staff members from the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. The project is sharing the materials with President-elect Bush’s transition team.

Help from old White House hands, however, hasn’t always been welcome.

Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, who worked there during the Ford-to-Carter transition and now is Bush’s transition chief, recalls: “The basic attitude is ‘If you’re so smart, how come we beat you? Why do we need to take your advice? You guys lost.’ ”

Compiling a kind of CliffsNotes for the West Wing is just one of a host of projects underway in Washington to ease the new president’s team into their jobs.

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, has the “Transition to Governing Project” to improve the move from campaigning to governing. The Brookings Institution, a liberal public policy institute, has the “Presidential Appointee Initiative” aimed at simplifying and streamlining the process--and the blizzard of paperwork--involved in overseeing thousands of appointments from the Cabinet to the defense secretary’s assistants.

The conservative Heritage Foundation is working on a project called “Mandate for Leadership,” a series of publications and conferences to guide the next administration. And the nonprofit Center for the Study of the Presidency plans to deliver a report to the next president with case studies about presidential leadership styles.

“Americans deserve a functioning government,” said Terry Sullivan, associate director of White House 2001 and professor at the University of North Carolina. “When presidents come in and stumble and fumble their way through their first three months, Americans are disappointed.”